Hurricane Ian is headed for the US state of Florida after passing through Cuba, where it left 11.2 million residents without electricity on Tuesday evening due to “an outage,” the state electric utility confirmed.
In a statement, the company Unión Elétrica (UNE) said that the Cuban national grid “is in an exceptional situation: zero electricity generation [sem fornecimento de eletricidade no país]”.
According to the official Juventud Rebelde newspaper, the outage occurred at 5:57 PM (10:57 PM in Lisbon), after Antonio Guiteras’ thermoelectric plant, one of the largest in the country, “went off the grid”. The call has yet to be answered, he added.
The outage initially affected about a million people in Cuba’s western provinces, but later the entire power grid went out.
“We are currently working on resuming the connection to the network. The work will continue (…) until dawn”, assured Lázaro Guerra, technical director of the UNE.
The Cuban Ministry of Energy and Mines, which is under the responsibility of the UNE, said the fault “is in the western, central and eastern connections” and that “the solution requires great precision”.
Cuba was already in an energy crisis, as of the country’s total generating capacity of 3,000 megawatts (MW), only 1,824 were in operation.
Hurricane Ian made landfall in western Cuba’s Pinar del Rio province Tuesday morning, where authorities have sheltered 55 and evacuated 50,000 people from their homes.
The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Cuba had suffered “significant consequences” from storm surges and sustained winds of 205 kilometers per hour.
TelePinar television, owned by the local government, confirmed significant damage to the main hospital in the city of Pinar del Rio.
No deaths have been reported so far.
In the Cuban capital, which is home to 2.1 million people, two houses have partially collapsed, according to Alexis Acosta, manager of Havana’s historic district.
Florida under state of emergency
The NHC said it expects Hurricane Ian to gain even more strength over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before arriving today, with winds of 150 miles per hour, in Florida, where authorities have evacuated 2.5 million people from their homes. expelled.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency deployed 5,000 National Guard troops from the state of Florida, with another 2,000 on standby in neighboring states.
US President Joe Biden also declared a state of emergency and authorized the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster response and provide assistance to protect life and property.
NASA decided to move the moon rocket from the launch pad to the Kennedy Space Center hangar, delaying the test flight for weeks.
Source: DN
